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I Rhone & Provence .% -Ito<</" t \ : - ./,/r Y-' ... .. " Ù. Privileged private G LAS S .Wï. - ,.\.-. ," \ visits & tastings iJ";.: '\',,"' .. ,' \ 1-800-578-0903 : t. , ;''' :A' ," Magnificent Millenrnum: www.inyourglass.com . . :!J :<I:' . Paris or Bordeaux cago, she called a number that someone had given her: Nelson Algren, novelist. For two days, he showed her what, in his Chicago-school view, were the local attractions: "I introduced her to stickup men, pimps, baggage thieves. . . . I took her on a tour of the County Jail and showed her the electric chair." Then they went back to his apartment and made love. Apparently, the American street kid enjoyed romancing the French existen- tialist, and vice versa. Still, it might have been just a passing thing had Beauvoir, upon returning to New York to fly back to France, not received a telegram from Sartre asking if she could delay her homecoming. Ehrenreich was in Paris and wanted to stay with him a little longer. Beauvoir promptly called Algren, and they spent two more weeks together, much of the time between the sheets. She had the first orgasm of her life, and they pledged themselves to each other. Now if Sartre had a lover intent on mar- riage, so did Beauvoir. Such marriages were not to be, but it took Algren a while to figure that out, so the affair lasted five years, from 1947 through. 1951, most of it conducted by mail. A TRANSATLANTIC LOVE AFFAIR" contains only Beauvoir's side of the correspondence. Apparently, the edi- tor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Beau- voir's adoptive daughter), was unable to get permission to include Algren's let- ters. This is a shame; Algren doesn't get his sa Still, Beauvoir's letters are fasci- nating. As Le Bon de Beauvoir points out in her preface, Beauvoir and Algren had little in common. She had to explain her world to him, and that is what she does-that is how she flirts, by con- structing for him a kind of comic theatre of Left Bank life in the forties and fif- ties. The political situation-the effort of France's postwar intellectuals to find some honorable ground between Amer- ican capitalism and Russian Commu- nism-is vividly sketched in, as is the lit- erary world, which at that point was inseparable from the political. She has lunch with Carlo Levi; his politics are O. K., but "he lies as naturally as he breathes," and he never picks up a check Cocteau, "a very well known French poet and pederast," is directing Sartre's new play. He has brought in Christian Bérard to help With the sets, but Bérard spends all his time crying, because his boyfriend THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 24 & 31, 1998 has passed out somewhere in the theatre from an ether overdose. Gide dies-"the one who got the Nobel Prize for having written all his life long that it was fine to be a pansy" -and the day after his death the poet Anne-Marie Cazalis sends a telegram to the Catholic writer François Mauriac, who, along with the poet Paul Claudel, was among Gide's arch- . " enemIes: HELL DOES NOT EXIST. l\1AY ENJOY YOURSELF. TELL CLAUDEL. ANDRÉ GIDE." Most of the artists in Paris seem to walk through these pages-Camus, of course, Raymond Qyeneau, Giacometti (whom Beauvoir adored), Richard Wright (one of the few friends Beauvoir and Algren had in common), Violette Leduc (madly in love with Beauvoir)- breathing and real, working like crazy all day and, at night, going to bars and get- ting drunk and arguing and slapping each other and seducing each other's lovers and then going off to rest for two months in the country. It is a portrait of the literary life from the inside, with the books born screaming. When Beauvoir published "The Prime of Life," the sec- ond volume of her autobiograph one of Sartre's mistresses, Wanda Kosakievicz, took a butcher knife and chopped up a copy-along with her own wrists-so enthusiastically that she practically bled to death. To these people, art mattered. In Beauvoir's near-English, the events seem all the more immediate, and her voice more intimate. In a foreign lan- guage, and in fear of losing Algren, she is unable to summon the self-assurance that made her, in many of her other writings, seem dry and dictatorial-"governessy;" to quote Elizabeth Hardwick's review of "The Second Sex." On the contrary, she sounds almost childlike and, at the same time, terribly intelligent and sincere. She also makes charming mistakes. One night she has to write by candlelight: "The electric lamp has blown up, as it of- ten happens." People are sending death threats in response to her and Sartre's anti-Gaullist broadcasts: "As you sa it is the worse disease not to be able of hu- mour." She herself was said not to be able of humor; love proved her otherwise. I T also ripped her in two. A crucial fact of the Beauvoir-Algren relation- ship was its sexual success. Algren, Beau- voir later said, was "the only truly pas- sionate love in my life." The experience didn't come till she was thirty-nine and